This week, Howes says the governance of Wayne State University is so screwed up that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the state's bi-partisan legislative leaders felt compelled to write the trustees a letter. The request? To "make the right decision" and establish a code of conduct or risk the Higher Learning Commission yanking the school's accreditation.…

Daniel Howes says Michigan State University's chaotic search for a new football coach demonstrates two things: the Spartans are willing to spend big to try and stay competitive, and the trustees are once again showing zero understanding of the difference between management and governance.Daniel Howes / The Detroit News

This week, Howes says Iowa's Democratic caucus debacle is an opportunity — for Michigan to become a go-first state in presidential politics. Unlike the cornfield capital of America, the home of the Motor City ticks all the boxes today's Democrats theoretically want, even need, to kick off the primary season. Most importantly: the path to the Oval O…

This week, Daniel Howes says Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a former state Senate minority leader, is not living up to her widely touted knack for working with the Legislature. Instead of delivering grand compromises with Republicans, the governor is adopting the unilateral tactics so popular in Washington nowadays — and her $3.5-billion debt-financed plan…

Howes says the Silicon Valley automaker, Tesla Inc., is getting its revenge. In one day last week, the company got approval to sell its electric vehicles directly to consumers in Michigan, epicenter of the automotive establishment. And this week, the market value of Tesla topped $100 billion dollars … making it more valuable than General Motors Co.…

This week, Daniel Howes says the winding down of President Donald Trump's parallel trade wars signals that an election year is here. Despite impeachment, Trump produced tangible results likely to quicken the country’s economic metabolism in the coming months … which is precisely the point. Racking up wins that buoy the economy … fatten paychecks … …

This week, Daniel Howes says the birthplace of the modern American labor movement is facing a reckoning. Thank a growing cadre of United Auto Workers leaders, including two of the past three presidents. Their scheming and embezzling, alleged and admitted, is pushing the 85-year-old union to the brink of federal oversight. And toward racketeering ch…

This week, Daniel Howes says President Donald Trump chose Michigan to counter the House impeachment vote because the state is shaping up to be a linchpin in his 2020 re-election effort. The signs are there: NBC News is tracking voter sentiment in and around Grand Rapids; the White House is tracking the votes of the state's Democratic members of Con…

This week, Daniel Howes says surreal juxtaposition of Democrats moving ahead with impeachment of President Donald Trump and even as reach agreement with him on a replacement for NAFTA proves there are no coincidences in politics.Daniel Howes / The Detroit News

This week, Daniel Howes say the new president of the United Auto Workers, Rory Gamble, has leverage to drive reform within -- and if he falters, the most likely alternative is federal oversight of the 84-year-old union.Daniel Howes / The Detroit News

This week, Daniel Howes says the antics coming from the boardrooms of the state’s Big Three universities will not change until the way Michigan chooses its trustees does. This is what you get when the over-riding qualification to serve on the boards is surviving the state’s Republican and Democratic nominating conventions. We’re the only state in t…

This week, Daniel Howes says the new name for the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot of France should be United Nations Motors. Rarely has the global auto world seen a cultural mash-up like the one announced this week: Jeep SUVs meet Citroën cars. Forget pooling technology spending and rationalizing vehicle architectures. If this transnational mer…

This week, Daniel Howes says the United Auto Workers strike against General Motors Co. netted members a healthy set of economics – on pay and bonuses, profit-sharing and continuing Cadillac health-care coverage. But it didn’t repatriate production from Mexico, didn’t reverse plant closings in three states and didn’t seriously address the threat to …

This week, Howes says the strange United Auto Workers strike against General Motors Co. is getting stranger in the wake of a tentative agreement. Instead of returning to work pending ratification by Friday, union leaders are keeping members on picket lines as they consider details of a new four-year agreement. And nowhere to be seen or heard from i…

This week, Daniel Howes says the United Auto Workers’ fight with General Motors Co. is a battle over dollars and cents pitting radically different visions of the future. And there’s no room for Old Detroit thinking because Old Detroit is dead, or should be, buried by denial, competition and the ignominy of begging Congress and taxpayers for money t…

This week, Daniel Howes says the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump will freeze Detroit’s automotive agenda in Washington. From trade deals with China, Canada and Mexico to fights over emissions policy, the nation’s capital is likely to be fixated on the political process – and the first casualty, just months from the arrival of an ele…

This week, Daniel Howes says that as United Auto Workers members strike General Motors Co., the union’s rank-and-file and its legion of retirees can thank the leadership’s corruption scandal for opening the political floodgates to the UAW’s traditional adversaries. The tales of greed and self-dealing will be used against UAW organizers … by anti-un…

This week, Daniel Howes says Detroit’s top two automakers – facing a potential circus surrounding national contract talks with the United Auto Workers – are jostling for position with the public and President Donald Trump. Ford’s claim? To be “America’s auto company,” a label freighted with meaning and subtle digs at rivals rescued a decade ago by …

This week, Daniel Howes says the federal corruption probe into the United Auto Workers and its joint training centers is heating up just as the union is negotiating new contracts with Detroit’s automakers. That’s a whole lot of not good for a UAW that once prided itself on being America’s, quote, “clean union.” The latest evidence and more than a h…

This week, Daniel Howes says there’s growing evidence that southeast Michigan’s auto towns are cool again. Credit the politics of the day, sure. But credit also a growing sense of obligation on the part of a new generation of leaders – and a belief that automakers in the heartland can succeed in an Auto 2.0 world with roots deeply planted in places…

This week, Howes says this may be a progressive moment for the Democratic Party aiming to oust President Trump from the White House, but their preferred policy preferences and reliably anti-business tone aren’t reassuring to voters in the industrial heartland. Did the Dems in Detroit this week speak to their anxieties? Not really. Did the few who b…

This week, Howes says, the Democrats vying to replace President Donald Trump might want to get a little savvier about the real economic issues facing the electorally vital industrial Midwest. Around here, so many of the issues that matter to everyday folks can be expressed in a four-letter word: jobs. Love him or hate him, Trump turned blue real es…

They’re waiting for the end at Lordstown, the giant auto plant General Motors says it no longer needs. And for the closure of the Vindicator, for the past 150 years Youngstown’s daily newspaper. They’re the latest casualties in a downward spiral gripping a politically important region trying to reinvent itself with advanced manufacturing and its ho…

This week, Howes says that not since the dark days of bankruptcy a decade ago are contract talks between the United Auto Workers and Detroit’s automakers likely to be as tough as the round beginning next week. It’s not because times are bad. It’s because times are good – a run of profitability and strong sales not seen since the 1960s. Yet change i…

This week, Daniel Howes says global automakers face a “profit desert” in coming years as spending for the Auto 2.0 spaces of mobility, autonomy and electrification consume vast amounts of capital. But returns on those investments are showing unmistakable signs of declining even as sales in major markets soften and break-even points rise. The trend …

This week, Daniel Howes says that Not since two Detroit automakers emerged from bankruptcy a decade ago has the hometown industry faced as much uncertainty as they do now in President Donald Trump's Washington. Chaos on tariffs and trade, emissions standards and self-driving vehicle legislation, conjures an F-word that hasn’t been used much in rece…

This week, Daniel Howes says the year-end closure of Marygrove College after 92 years in Detroit doesn’t mean the end of education on its Gothic campus. No, two years of planning now ensure the 53-acre site will once again educate Detroiters, as “The School @ Marygrove” enrolls 120 ninth graders this fall and the University of Michigan launches a t…

This week, Daniel Howes says parochial French politicking effectively killed Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV’s proposed merger with Renault SA of France. Increasing French demands to benefit French interests signaled to FCA’s leadership the likely shape of things to come as they considered the scale of the merger they proposed to execute. What did the…

This week, Daniel Howes says public education in Michigan is facing a crisis every bit as threatening to its future as the bankruptcies of Detroit and two of its automakers. And remedies to fix the deepening problems may prove even more difficult. More than fixing “the damn roads” -- or cutting auto insurance rates -- reforming K-12 education is pe…

This week, Howes says Detroit’s first new auto plant in nearly 30 years is a go, but not without the usual complaining about process and untrustworthy business people. The city’s deal with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV gives city residents first crack at the nearly 5,000 jobs to be created there – and offers yet more evidence that the Motor City is …

Escalating trade tensions between the United States and China may be slowing auto sales there, but they’re also exposing the vulnerabilities of Detroit’s automakers in the world’s largest auto market. The net effect could be a reassessment of their collective footprint there, especially as domestic automaker’s claim ever larger chunks of the Chines…

This week, Daniel Howes says the “goods news” of General Motors Co. finding a potential buyer for its Lordstown Assembly Plant in northeast Ohio is drawing mixed reactions because the potential results could be mixed. Replacing the scale, jobs and payroll of a modern auto plant is next to impossible in an increasingly lean – and non-union – private…

This week, Daniel Howes says bipartisan opposition to the rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement is forcing President Donald Trump and his trade team to scramble for votes. The problem: House Democrats led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi have precisely zero motivation to give Trump a win on trade amid escalating fights over access to White Hous…

This week, Daniel Howes says the Ilitch family’s billion-dollar investment in its District Detroit, anchored by Little Caesars Arena, is being dogged by broken promises. Critics, including a new HBO segment, say the owners of Detroit’s Tigers and Red Wings have failed to deliver the residential, retail and restaurant investments promised in exchang…

This week, Daniel Howes says signs are growing that Ford Motor Co. is no longer the Rodney Dangerfield of the auto industry – the company that gets no respect. But investor sentiment is changing because reality is changing. The Blue Oval’s global restructuring is taking shape with cutbacks in Europe and South America, greater reliance on its partne…

This week, Daniel Howes says President Donald Trump’s whipsawing on trade and tariffs is exhausting the very people it’s intended to help. Threats to close the U.S.-Mexico border are withdrawn … only to be replaced by the promise of new tariffs on cars, trucks and SUVs built in Mexico for the U.S. market. This is what "Art of the Deal" leverage loo…

This week, Daniel Howes says federal authorities investigating alleged corruption inside the United Auto Workers are asking some of the same questions a U.S. Senate committee asked 60-plus years ago: are staff donations to their so-called “flower funds” voluntary? And have ranking union officials who control the funds pocketed some of the cash for …

This week, Daniel Howes says Detroit’s automakers are using investment decisions in a union contract year to politick President Donald Trump. The reason: General Motors Co.’s plans to close four U.S. plants as part of a restructuring moved the president to repeatedly lambaste the automaker on Twitter and in public appearances. In the forming battle…

This week, Daniel Howes says Gretchen Whitmer’s budget address helped answer whether Michigan business still has a friend in the governor’s office: not so much. The net effect of her business tax proposals — most of which are unlikely to survive the Republican-controlled Legislature — would be a tap on the economic brakes just as the hometown auto …

This week, Daniel Howes says Fiat Chrysler’s plans to invest $4.5 billion and create 6,500 tax-paying jobs to build a new Jeep plant in Detroit vindicates late-CEO Sergio Marchionne’s call three years ago to abandon small cars in the United States and weight the lineup more heavily to trucks and SUVs. A company controlled by Italians and run by a B…

This week, Daniel Howes says Detroit’s auto industry has lost the best friend in Washington it probably ever had. Congressman John Dingell served in the House of Representatives for 60 years, the longest tenure in American history. He died at 92, but he never forgot where he came from, who his people were, or what industry defined his corner of the…